THE DRY FARMING CONGRESS. 



219 



Eighth Session, Thursday Afternoon. 



The Congress was called to order at two o'clock, Governor Brooks 

 presiding. 



GOV. BROOKS: "The convention will please come to order. The 

 report of the Resolutions Committee will be made a special order of 

 business at four o'clock. I will invite Chairman Bowman to preside for 

 a while this afternoon. We will follow the program closely and will en- 

 deavor to have discussions from the floor a little later. 



THE RELATION OF DRY FARMING DEVELOPMENT TO 

 COLONIZATION IN THE WEST. 



By C. L. Seagraves, General Colonization Agent, . Atchison, Topeka & 

 Santa Fe Railroad Company, Chicago. 



MR. SEAGRAVES: "Dry farming, or to be exact, 'scientific soil cul- 

 ture,' is playing a very important part in colonizing the lands in the 

 semi-arid sections of the Southwest. 



"In the early days of central, and especially western Kansas, it 

 was hit or miss with the homeseeker, more often miss. When harvest 

 time came with no crop to harvest, the poor settler loaded his family 

 and his few worldly possessions on the prairie schooner that had brought 

 him West and headed back East to his wife's folks, ready to condemn 

 and curse a country which he did not understand. 



Causes of Failure. 



"In many cases, of course, he belonged to that shiftless, roaming 

 class that overrun every new country, who are never satisfied unless 

 on the move, men who are ready to change location on the slightest pro- 

 vocation and consequently always end in failure. 



"There were, however, some disastrous years when the most ap- 

 proved methods and the most painstaking care could not produce crops. 

 The history of western Kansas a decade ago has been paralelled in 

 many other sections in the West. Thousands of acres of land regarded 

 at first as almost worthless have been reclaimed at the expense of 

 much hard work, disappointments, crop failures, bankruptcy and hard- 

 ships which the weaker ones could not long endure. But the strong 

 resourceful courageous man who stuck to his plow finally won the fight 

 and prospered. 



"These, together with those who were forced to remain and could 

 not get away, finally pulled through and under circumstances that the 

 present generation would not have the courage to face. These pioneers 

 of dry farming deserve unstinted praise for demonstrating the agricul- 

 tural possibilities of those sections where the rainfall is twenty inches 

 and less. While they have not all proven successes, the percentages 

 are sufficiently great to demonstrate the practibility of this method. 



